The present disclosure relates generally to information handling systems, and more particularly to dynamically rebalancing the traffic load across a network of information handling systems.
As the value and use of information continues to increase, individuals and businesses seek additional ways to process and store information. One option is an information handling system (IHS). An IHS generally processes, compiles, stores, and/or communicates information or data for business, personal, or other purposes. Because technology and information handling needs and requirements may vary between different applications, IHSs may also vary regarding what information is handled, how the information is handled, how much information is processed, stored, or communicated, and how quickly and efficiently the information may be processed, stored, or communicated. The variations in IHSs allow for IHSs to be general or configured for a specific user or specific use such as financial transaction processing, airline reservations, enterprise data storage, or global communications. In addition, IHSs may include a variety of hardware and software components that may be configured to process, store, and communicate information and may include one or more computer systems, data storage systems, and networking systems.
IHSs may be networked together using, for example, router IHSs that may route traffic between client IHSs and server IHSs. Existing routing protocols are used by router IHSs to calculate routes for network traffic based on local knowledge and determine the optimal paths for the traffic using static weights for the links to other router IHSs. However, such static routing of traffic may result in under-utilized links in the network. Equal Cost Multi-Path (ECMP) routing attempts to solve this problem by load balancing available links. However, ECMP routing operates independently on each router IHS with no knowledge of the global network state and, as a result, may not be able to provide globally optimized paths in the network.
Various conventional approaches attempt to remedy these problems by detecting link loads and modifying the weights on congested links. However, this leads to undesirable situations where frequent changes to link weights, or link weight modifications on too many links in the network, cause the link weights to differ greatly from initial administrative settings and result in unpredictable routing issues including routing loops. Other conventional approaches include centralized management solutions that attempt to monitor the link loads across the entire network and reroute traffic around congested links, but such solutions are quite complex and tend to be slow to react to congestion scenarios.
Accordingly, it would be desirable to provide an improved network load rebalancing system.